David E. James: Center for Interdisciplinary Research: Faculty Fellowship, 2003-04
Film and Popular Music in the United States and Britain since the 1950s.
1. Impact:
This proposal is for an interdisciplinary research project across the fields of Film & Television,
Music, and English Literature. It will impact cinema history in presenting a full account of the
history of a genre that has so far been entirely neglected, that is, the musical based on
contemporary popular music; it will impact musicology in demonstrating how cinema and
television have for the past half century been crucial in the formulation and dissemination of
new musical styles; and it will impact literary history in showing how the thematics and social
existence of Romantic poetry have been reproduced in another medium some two hundred
years after their initial formulation.
2. Research Project:
In England in early summer 2002, the popular press was preoccupied with the events
surrounding the celebration of the Queen’s fiftieth year as monarch. Only a couple of weeks
after Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and other rock and roll royalty had performed for the real
royals at the Jubilee itself, the lead Rolling Stone, singer Mick Jagger was knighted in Queen’s
Jubilee Birthday Honors List. Whatever one’s feeling about the intrinsic qualities of the music
behind these recognitions, it is clear that a cultural movement that was once thought to herald
the Decline of Western Civilization had received sanction at the highest social levels. Parallel
forms of endorsement have been common for a much longer time in the United States, where
rock and roll and its various corollary and sub-genres have become identified as being essential
components of American culture on all levels. It has not always been so. Frank Sinatra’s
assessment of the music -- “sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons . . .
the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear”--
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is not an untypical example of the panic that surrounded what everyone in the mid-1950s-musicians, sociologists, educators, and politicians alike-- recognized as a significant rupture in
American culture. But now the various popular musics that have developed from it have been
integrated into all other forms of Western culture (television, film, literature, dance, fashion,
art, and all other forms of music), all other aspects of the entertainment and advertising
industries, and into social, economic, and political life generally. Contemporary popular music
is no longer simply a sonic or auditory phenomenon but, much more so than previous musical
practices, it is fundamentally an intermedia form, existing within a plethora of other media,
especially film and television. As a result, it can only be understood via interdisciplinary modes
of analysis.
Cinema has been intrinsic to its evolution. In the mid-1905s, only fly-by-night exploitation
film producers were willing to invest in it. The only major studio film, Fox’s The Girl Can’t Help It,
starred Jayne Mansfield as a young woman who did everything she could to avoid becoming a rock
and roll star. Around the same time, Elvis Presley, a supreme if supremely contradictory figure in
American culture, initially made a more productive migration from pop to cinema, but after his
return from the army, his Hollywood career increasingly stood in for his absence from the musical
milieu. But after the Beatles, who had already transformed American popular music in the 1960s
and introduced Britain as a significant factor in global pop music and films dealing with it, released
A Hard Day’s Night, everything changed. The film was an enormous financial and critical success,
and it also generated a new synergistic interdependence between the movie and record industries,
specifically in uniting the creation of the soundtrack album and the film as interdependent
components of a single entrepreneurial endeavor. From this point, through the 1980s, a series of
such combined film/ music undertakings (Woodstock, Saturday Night Fever, Tommy, and so on)
returned enormous profits while providing the most powerful repertoire of images for youth
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cultures, and also transforming the structure of the film and music industries. For the past two
decades, these industries have been entirely integrated with each other, and popular music has
become an integral part of the semiology, thematics, and marketing-strategies of a large proportion
of contemporary entertainment films. Pop music, film, and television are all interdependent forms
of the unified cultural gestalt that dominates the American, European and increasingly global
imagination and pocket-book.
Despite the manifest importance of these developments, neither the rock and roll film
nor rock and roll TV shows have received serious academic attention. The classical musical of
the 1930s-1950s is a major concern of cinema studies; it and parallel genres-- the modern
gangster film, science fiction film, even pornography-- have all generated sizable critical and
theoretical literatures. But what is arguably one of the most radically transformative
development in the entertainment industry has been largely ignored. What books there are on
the topic are fans’ compendia listing films that contain rock and roll in some form or other, such
as Marshall Crenshaw’s Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock’n’roll in the Movies (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994); though these are invaluable resources, none contain scholarly analysis of the
kind that modern film studies has developed for other genres. The only single-author book that
I have found is R. Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), which is informative on the industrial developments that
sustained the synergy between the two mediums, but which is entirely unaware of the
methodologies of academic film analysis.
My project will rectify this situation. It is organized historically, structured on a
periodization of the history of post-1950s popular music into a series of phases: the beginning in
the mid-1950s; the folk-music boom of the early 1960s; the British Invasion of the mid-1960s; the
American counter-culture of the late 1960s; early 1970s soul music; then disco, punk, hip-
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hop/rap, and so on. I take each of these as marking, not only a musical evolution, but also an
evolution in the position of rock and roll in the music industry (the gradual move from
marginal production small record companies to a central position in the integrated film/music/
television/entertainment conglomerates of the 1990s and after). At the same time, the social
meaning of the music is transformed; its social implications (delinquent, revolutionary, wholly
assimilated, and so on) change, as do the connections it is able to make with other art forms and
with other social activities. Finally these developments run parallel, if only roughly, to the
evolution of critical methodologies in musicology, film studies, and especially Cultural Studies.
For each of these phase, I will select a handful of representative films, and consider them in
light of the social meaning and function that the music has in the period and investigate the
mechanisms and priorities that inform the translation of the specific music in question to
cinema, primarily to the commercial Hollywood cinema and broadcast television, but also to
the different forms of non-commercial or marginal film production that each era differently
permits.
At all stages in these developments, films featuring rock and roll have several functions.
Initially they are merely a means of disseminating the music. In films of the earliest period, that
of the “Juke Box Musicals” singers and musicians are seen lip-synching to hit records; these are
essentially a form of visual radio, providing a visual experience alongside the aural pleasures of
the record, though also allowing for the dissemination of other elements that comprise the fan
cultures (body language, dance-steps, clothing, hair-styles etc), but the narratives themselves
are perfunctory. As the films develop more complicated narratives, more sophisticated
strategies of justifying the musical interludes are created. The narratives inevitably generate
messages about the social implications of the music as they mobilize attitudes to a number of
key themes, especially motifs concerning teenagers and the generation gap, attitudes towards
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sexuality, definitions of delinquency, and attitudes towards ethnic minorities, especially African
Americans. The periodic reconstruction of these themes in the different phases of rock and roll
registers the transformation of its social meaning; cinema and television become the major
arenas in which the often contradictory and provisional implications of the music are negotiated
into the public realm. In other words, cinema is one of the mechanisms by which the public
comes, not just to know popular music, but to know what it means-- or at least what the
agencies who make films think it means. The conditions that determine the negotiation of the
music into cinema are often reflected in the issues that the films generate in their narratives.
Three final points:
i. A proposal to spend a year of researching and writing about the movies and rock and
roll is in a double jeopardy; both components may appear to lack the august serious that
dignifies legitimate academic undertakings. This is problem that historians of both popular
cinema and popular music recurrently face, and indeed I suspect it explains why the present
topic has so far been virtually anathema to academic film historians. I hope that my outline
above has at least demonstrated that the issues with which I am concerned have affected
Western cultural and social life sufficiently profoundly to merit sustained, critical attention.
ii. Two, I have previously been concerned to develop methodologies for studying the
relations between film and popular music, both in my book Allegories of Cinema (one chapter of
which was concerned with the relationship between Underground film and modern jazz) and in
occasional writings (e.g. an essay on the use of rock and roll in films and novels about the
Vietnam War, published in the journal, Representations). Since then, my other research and
administrative responsibilities (I was chair of our department from 1994-1994, and again in
2000) have prevented me from pursuing this topic, and only this year I have been able to return
to teaching it.
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iii. the combined aesthetic and sociological bases of this project address long-term
developments in Western culture. Though I do not have space to explain it here, these
developments can I believe be best understood through the cultural developments that
occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, the period of Romanticism. As a recent
scholar has noted, “Rock is the aesthetic of Romanticism vulgarized” (Robert Pattison, The
Triumph of Vulgarity [New York; Oxford University Press, 1987], 188). In returning to English
Literature for my overall historical paradigms, I am returning to the field of my dissertation and
initial scholarly career.
3. Work Plan:
I will spend most of the academic year researching and writing (and being available to my
graduate students) here at USC, also working with the archives at UCLA and the Academy of
Motion Pictures. But I would also spend perhaps two months in London working at the British
Film Institute
4. Other faculty: At present, this is an individual research project.
5. The project will culminated in an approximately 100,000 word book.
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